Established in 1862 by Swedish Lutheran immigrants, Gustavus Adolphus
College is a private, liberal arts college that provides an undergraduate
education of recognized excellence. The Alfred Nobel Hall of Science at
the College was named as a memorial to the great Swedish inventor and
philanthropist. Following its dedication in 1963—which was attended by
Nobel Foundation officials and 26 Nobel laureates—the College sought
endorsement from the Nobel Foundation for an annual science conference.
Permission was granted and the conference, now in its sixth decade,
continues to set a standard for timeliness, intellectual inquiry, and free debate
of contemporary issues related to the natural and social sciences.

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What is the Universe like, and how
does it behave, at the very smallest,
microscopic scales? What lies beneath
the level of the atoms that make up
the ordinary matter that the Universe
contains? What, exactly, is “in there”?

WHAT
LIES
AT
THE
LIMITS
OF
Steve Mellema
Professor of Physics and
Chair of Nobel Conference 49

What does the Universe look like,
and how does it behave, at the very
largest, astronomical distances? What
lies beyond our solar system, beyond
our galaxy? What, exactly, is “out
there”?
If we look back in time, where did it
all come from? And, as for the future,
where is it all going?
Throughout most of the history of Western science,
these seemingly disparate lines of inquiry have been
carried out independently of one another—studying
the natures of the big and of the small, seeking to
understand the history of the Universe’s past and
trying to make predictions about its future. Along
the way, philosophers and theologians have also been
involved in the dialogue. Is there a role for God in
the creation and evolution of the Universe? Is the
existence of intelligent life unique to Earth?
The surprising directions that science took in
the 20th century have shown us that all of these
questions and studies are, in fact, interconnected. If
the Universe began in some explosive Big Bang 14
billion years ago and has been expanding ever since,
we seek to understand its origins both by looking
“out there” with our most powerful telescopes,
and by looking “in there” using particle detectors
at accelerator laboratories that seek to recreate the
conditions of that early Universe. And, if the ultimate
constituents of our Universe include entities that we
have not yet discovered or understood, we now seek
them, both in the particle collisions that we carry
out at places like the Large Hadron Collider and
by measuring the cosmic rays that arrive here from
the farthest reaches of space and are captured in a
detector at the International Space Station.
Nobel Conference 49: “The Universe at Its Limits”
will bring together leading scholars to discuss these
questions and, especially, their interconnectedness. In

the end, we may ask questions not only about the limits of
the Universe but also about the limits to human knowledge.

In ancient Greece, Democritus first proposed the idea of an
atom as the smallest, indivisible piece of any type of matter,
and Aristotle proposed a model of the heavens in which
the Earth was at the center and all the other visible objects
orbited in perfect circles. Ptolemy refined that model and
gave it exquisite precision; his theory’s ability to predict the
positions of astronomical objects in the sky at any particular
time made it perhaps the longest-lived theory in the history
of science, lasting almost 1500 years.

At the limit of the very large, the late astronomer Carl Sagan
used the phrase “We are made of star stuff.” What he meant
was that every atom that exists in your body, at this instant,
once lived inside a star. We human beings not only study
the cosmological evolution of the Universe, but our very
essence, the matter of which we are composed, is a part of
that evolution. The stars we see in the sky seem to appear,
faithfully, in the same relative positions, night after night.
The ancients thought of them as eternal entities, fixed to a
celestial sphere that rotated forever around the Earth. But
we now know that stars are born and die, in a grand cycle of
cosmic evolution. Our own Sun and the component parts of
its solar system were born out of the remnants of previous
stars. The elements that make up our planet (and us) have
been built up over billions of years, in the many generations
of stars that have gone through their life cycles.

In the two millennia since they began, these investigations
of the very big and the very small have continued, and
much has been learned. The natural philosophers’ ideas
and theories have been challenged and refined by the
experimenters’ instruments and measurements. Clever
inventors made microscopes to look “inside” and then
telescopes to look “out there.” Centuries of refinements that
have given us instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope
and the Large Hadron Collider have made possible
measurements on both the largest and smallest scales that
would have been inconceivable not so very long ago.
But what are the fundamental discoveries of the 20th
century that have inextricably connected the studies of these
two limits—the very large and very small? And how do we
now approach the answers to the big questions about the
origin, evolution, and future of the Universe?
At the limit of the very small, the atomic theorized by
Democritus went in and out of favor over the two millennia
after it was first proposed. Even after John Dalton used
atomic theory in the mid-19th century to explain the
constant ratios of weights observed in every chemical
reaction, the very existence of atoms was questioned by
competing theories. When J.J. Thomson discovered the
electron in the late 19th century, it became clear that atoms
are not indivisible, that they have smaller, constituent parts.
The 20th-century discoveries of the proton and neutron
as the other constituent parts of the atom, followed by the
discovery of a whole “zoo” of fundamental particles, led to
the development of what is called the Standard Model—to
explain the collections of and interconnections between
the tiniest particles that are the ultimate constituents of our
Universe.
At accelerator laboratories of increasing energy, size, and
cost, scientists have sought to create and investigate these
particles and the forces that govern their behavior. Albert
Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2, which tells us that
energy can be converted into mass and vice versa, explains
the need for higher and higher energy particle accelerators.
As we seek to study more exotic particles with higher
masses, from the top quark discovery of the 1990s to the

Telescopes are time machines. Once we realized that light,
although very fast, travels at a finite speed, we realized that
whenever we use our telescopes to look “out there” in space
we are also looking back in time. The farther away we look
at astronomical objects, the longer ago the light reaching us
was emitted, and so the older is the picture that we see.
Edwin Hubble was the first to observe that, as we look deep
into outer space at distant galaxies, every galaxy is moving
away from every other galaxy, and that the farther apart the
galaxies are, the faster they recede from one another. What
at first seemed like a conundrum had a simple solution:
the Universe itself, the very space which we are studying,
is expanding. Like the raisins in a cake that is rising as it
bakes in an oven, they get farther and farther apart as the
cake itself gets bigger. Playing this story of the Universe
in reverse, of course, means that it all began from a single
point, a so-called “singularity,” which we call the Big Bang.
What we know about gravity and energy tells us that, as
the Universe has expanded against the pull of gravity, its
temperature has fallen. This means that the farther back we
look in time, the smaller, denser, and hotter the Universe.
The conditions of the very early Universe, right after the Big
Bang, were so hot that matter as we know it—nuclei and
electrons bound together inside atoms, even protons and
neutrons—could not exist.
What did exist? Only those fundamental constituent
particles and forces that other scientists have been seeking
at the limits of the very small. And so, if we want to
understand the origin and evolution of this vast Universe of
ever-receding galaxies and ever-expanding space, we must
understand the relationships and interactions of its tiniest
constituent parts.

NOBEL CONFERENCE 49

5

particles. Asymptotic freedom, which was independently
discovered by David Politzer, was important for the
development of quantum chromodynamics and earned
Gross, Politzer, and Wiczek the 2004 Nobel Prize in
physics.

What do you do after you win the Nobel Prize for your
PhD thesis work? You study anything you want. So, Frank
Wilczek picks problems that he finds interesting, which
helps keep the excitement of discovery in his work. Some
problems in physics bother him because nobody has
studied them or they haven’t been well-studied. Those
are the ones he likes to go after. Sometimes they are very
esoteric, but not totally without regard for usefulness,
like his work on the nature of the universe. Even as he
continues that work, as experiments catch up to the
theory providing challenges and tweaks, he is moving on
in new areas. He approaches these with a “more mature
attitude,” he says, looking for problems that are more
practical and useful, like exotic electronics.
As a small child, Frank Wilczek was interested in puzzles
and mathematics. He was born in Mineola, New York,
on Long Island, and was educated in the public schools
of Queens. He says that he was born to do theoretical
work, and was very fortunate to have been educated
by excellent teachers. When he was in high school, his
parents realized that he was exceptional and encouraged
him to pursue his dream of solving mathematical puzzles.
He received his bachelor of science degree in mathematics
at the University of Chicago in 1970, a master of arts
in mathematics at Princeton University in 1972, and
a PhD in physics at Princeton University in 1974. In
1973 Wilczek, working with his adviser, David Gross,
at Princeton University, discovered asymptotic freedom.
This theory holds that “the closer quarks are to each
other, the less the strong interaction between them.”
When quarks are in extreme proximity, the nuclear force
between them is so weak that they behave almost as free

6

THE UNIVERSE AT ITS LIMITS

Early in his career, Professor Wilczek’s research was
focused on one of the basic interactions of nature, the
strong nuclear force. He says that at that time nuclear
forces were very mysterious, partly because their domain
was limited to the size of the nucleus of an atom.
Scientists had rules of thumb but no real equations and
despaired that they would ever find any. It turns out
that the strong force has much simpler forms in extreme
cases, like those found shortly after the Big Bang.
Wilczek and Gross were able to develop a mathematically
coherent model and essentially identified a new kind of
particle (gluons) to make equations consistant, which
were subsequently discovered. Wiczek says that the
mathematical symmetry that they discovered enabled
them to dream up a model for unification of all four
forces in nature, work that is still being tested today at
CERN.
In the last 20 years or so, Professor Wiczek has turned
to using some of the same mathematical ideas to
describe matter in other extreme conditions—at low
temperatures. At low temperatures quantum mechanics
comes into its own and gives good descriptions of the
exotic behavior of many materials. Applying the concepts
of field theory developed for the realm of nuclear physics
to semiconducting materials at low temperatures has
given rise to one approach to quantum computers.
Frank is also beginning to explore research in other
areas of engineering and applied physics, making use of
mathematics that he developed for condensed matter and
nuclear physics.
Wilczek says of his work that although it doesn’t have
practical implications like curing cancer or ending hunger,
it allows us to better appreciate our world. It doesn’t give
us any insight into god or religion, but the more that it
gets disseminated, the more it enriches peoples’ lives. Like
music and art, it has potential cultural value.
Frank Wiczek would like folks to know that he is just a
regular guy. He and has wife, Betsy Devine, have two
daughters of whom they are very proud. He has many
interests, including music. In August of 2006, he had
his operatic singing debut in Atom & Eve, which was
performed in Alpbach, Austria, getting favorable reviews
in the New York Times. He also plays the piano and is
currently working on a mystery novel. And, Frank still
loves doing puzzles.

Tara Shears, PhD, professor of physics and
Royal Society University Research Fellow working
with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project,
University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

CERN, the European center for particle physics, is “a
place where magic is explained,” actor Tom Hanks said
when interviewed about his movie Angels and Demons.
That makes Tara Shears something of a magician. But she
describes science as an adventure, a voyage of discovery
in which she is armed only with the barest of tools.
So, maybe she is more like an explorer, trying to find
the underlying principles that link the outcomes of her
experiments and then connecting those same principles to
the behavior of stars, weather systems, and fundamental
particles. She describes it as amazing and humbling. For
an instant science gives her a glimpse of something deep
and profound running through the universe.
As an undergraduate at Imperial College London, Tara
Shears was interested in the big questions, like why are
there stars and planets in the sky. She knew that she had
to study physics, and when the university first offered a
course in particle physics, she had to take it. As she puts
it, “Things at CERN were getting very interesting.” She
decided that she wanted to get her doctorate and do her
own experiments in particle physics and subsequently
went on to earn her PhD from Cambridge University.
She started her experimental career investigating the
behavior of fundamental particles and forces at the
OPAL experiment at CERN. In 2000, she was awarded
a Royal Society University Research Fellowship with the
University of Liverpool to continue her research at the
Fermilab particle physics facility in the United States. And
in 2004 Tara joined the LHCb experiment at CERN’s
Large Hadron Collider, an experiment designed to
investigate where all the antimatter in the universe has
gone. Data collection started in earnest in 2010 and she
is working with her collaborators analyzing the data and
hoping to find some answers.

Shears quotes Robert Wilson who, when asked what value
particle physics research had in defending the United
States, said, “None, except to make it worth defending.”
She believes that statement encapsulates why science
is so important. Great science, like great art, enriches
our lives and gives us a way to make sense of the world.
But this isn’t just philosophy. The most arcane areas of
scientific research can yield surprisingly useful spin-offs.
We probably can’t imagine life without electricity. Or
electronics of all kinds. Without semiconductors and their
use in all aspects of computing and telecommunication,
we wouldn’t have smart phones. If not for the need of
scientists at CERN to share large amounts of data with
collaborators around the world, we wouldn’t have the
World Wide Web. Science shapes our culture and pushes
our civilization forward—that’s why it’s so important.
But large scientific enterprises like CERN also provide
examples of international cooperation, as scientists from
around the world and from all political systems work
together in an attempt to find answers to the most
fundamental questions. Explicitly stated in its founding
documents, CERN was set up so that anyone could study
fundamental physics and the results would be shared with
everyone around the world, enabling people from all
places to work together after World War Two.
Tara shears enjoys hiking in the mountains and cross
country skiing when she has the time. She also enjoys
going out to eat, going to the opera, and listening to
jazz. Her interest in jazz stems from her time at Fermilab,
when she would go to the Jazz Showcase in Chicago,
where she heard all the great jazz musicians.

Dr. Shears finds her work incredibly exciting. She has
the opportunity to look at a facet of universe that is
completely unexplored, to study the very small pieces
that nobody has looked at yet. She describes the basic
theory as quite simple, but we need to construct huge
experiments to explore it. The only guide book for this
scientific adventure is the scientific process itself, and it
is important to her that science is a process carried out
in the most objective way possible. Scientific laws are not
subject to spin or reinterpretation, unless they’re wrong.
Scientists must be rigorous about separating any personal
bias from their results. The view of the universe this gives
us is the clearest it can be.
NOBEL CONFERENCE 49

7

are small physically distinct subclasses of H-poor (Type 1)
supenovae.

Alexei V. Filippenko, PhD, professor of

physics and Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished
Professor in the Physical Sciences, Department of
Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley

Alexei Vladimir Filippenko (Alex) says that he was interested
in science for as long as he can remember, back to the first
grade when he played with magnets and iron filings in the
sandbox. He was a budding chemist from ages 10 through
17, but astronomy became a growing hobby in high school,
after he “discovered” Saturn on his own at age 14 with a
small telescope given to him by his parents. Graduating from
Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California, he went
on to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where
he took a wonderful astronomy course that showed him
the deep connection between the physics of the very small
and the very large. Realizing that he could “have it all” as
an astrophysicist, he switched his major from chemistry
to physics at the end of his first year. After earning his
bachelor’s degree, he went on to the California Institute of
Technology as a Hertz Foundation Fellow to earn his PhD
in astronomy. He was a Miller Fellow at the University of
the University of California, Berkeley, and was subsequently
appointed to a faculty position at the same institution.
Filippenko is involved primarily in observational studies at
optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared wavelengths, mainly
using data from the Keck 10-meter telescopes, the Lick
3-meter reflector, and the Hubble Space Telescope. In
addition, his group has developed the 0.8-meter Katzman
Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), Lick Observatory,
which obtains data robomatically, every clear night, without
human intervention. With KAIT, they have conducted
one of the world’s most successful searches for nearby
supernovae, having found about 1,000 of them since 1998.
Alex’s group has spectroscopically classified hundreds
of objects, providing a rich database for individual and
statistical studies. For example, their work shows that there
8

THE UNIVERSE AT ITS LIMITS

One of his group’s major activities is to use supernovae
as cosmological distance indicators, and to improve their
utility through detailed studies of nearby supernovae.
In 1998, Alex was a member of two separate teams that
announced that high-redshift Type Ia supernovae seem to
be dimmer (and hence farther away) than expected. This
led to the conclusion that the expansion of the Universe is
now accelerating, perhaps due to the cosmic “antigravity”
effect of a nonzero vacuum energy density or some other
type of “dark energy,” findings that were deemed the “Top
Science Breakthrough of 1998” by Science magazine.
Completely independent studies using different techniques
and conducted by other researchers confirmed the cosmic
acceleration, leading to the recognition of this discovery
with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics to the teams’ leaders.
Alex has long been interested in determining the physical
properties of quasars and active galactic nuclei. He was a
member of the team that used the Hubble Space Telescope
to investigate supermassive black holes in the nuclei of
nearby galaxies and determined the relationship between the
central black hole’s mass and the stellar velocity dispersion.
His group has also found strong evidence for stellar-mass
black holes in several binary star systems.
Filippenko is a professor of astronomy and the Richard &
Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical
Sciences at UC Berkeley. His research accomplishments,
documented in more than 700 published papers, have
been recognized with several major prizes including a
Guggenheim Fellowship, and he is one of the world’s most
highly cited astronomers. In 2009 he was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences, and he shared part of the
Gruber Cosmology Prize in 2007 for the discovery of the
accelerating expansion of the Universe.
Alex has won the top teaching awards at UC Berkeley and
has been voted the “Best Professor” on campus a record
nine times. In 2006 he was selected as the Carnegie/
CASE National Professor of the Year among doctoral and
research institutions, and in 2010 he won the Astronomical
Society of the Pacific’s Emmons Award for undergraduate
teaching. He has delivered more than 700 public lectures
to a wide range of audiences, produced five richly illustrated
astronomy video courses with The Great Courses, coauthored
an award-winning college astronomy textbook, and appears
in numerous TV science documentaries including about 40
episodes of The Universe series. In 2004, he was awarded the
Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. An avid tennis
player, hiker, skier, snorkeler, and world traveler, he enjoys
spending time with his family and is addicted to observing
total solar eclipses (12 so far).

Samuel C.C. Ting grew up in an academic family. He was
born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his parents met as
graduate students. His parents had hoped that he would
be born in China, but he was born prematurely while they
were visiting the United States. And, by accident of birth, he
became an American citizen. Two months after his birth his
family returned to China where, due mainly to the Japanese
invasion of China, Samuel was largely home-schooled by his
parents until age twelve. After the war, his parents became
professors of engineering and psychology at National Taiwan
University in Taipei, Taiwan, and Samuel attended the
prestigious Provincial Chien-Kuo High School in Taipei.
Because his parents were always associated with universities
Samuel had the opportunity to meet many accomplished
scholars, and he developed the desire to be associated with
university life. After high school he studied at National
Cheng Kung University, Tainan City, before returning to
the United States and Ann Arbor to finish degrees in both
mathematics and physics from the University of Michigan.
He stayed with the family of his parents’ friend, who was
the dean of the School of Engineering, and worked his
way through college in only three years, maintaining high
grades in order to keep his scholarships. He continued his
education, earning his PhD in physics in three more years
before becoming a Ford Foundation Fellow at the European
Organization for Nuclear Research, which would later
become CERN. Samuel says that he had the good fortune of
working with Giuseppe Cocconi at the Proton Synchrotron,
who taught him a lot of physics. He says of Cocconi that he
always had a simple way of viewing complicated problems
and did his experiments with great care.

the possibilities for experimental high-energy physics on
Earth, Ting proposed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a
space-borne cosmic-ray detector. The proposal was accepted
and he became the principal investigator of this massive
$1.5 billion undertaking involving 500 scientists from 56
institutions and 16 countries. A prototype was flown and
tested on the Space Shuttle in 1998, but Ting was forced to
lobby the United States Congress and the public to secure
an additional Shuttle flight dedicated to this project after
NASA announced that the Shuttle was to be retired in 2010.
The AMS, successfully installed on the International Space
Station in May of 2011, is a particle physics experiment
module designed to measure antimatter in cosmic rays and
search for evidence of dark matter. In March 2013, at a
seminar at CERN, Professor Samuel Ting reported that AMS
had observed over 400,000 positrons, with the positron-toelectron fraction increasing from 10 GeV to 250 GeV but
showing a slower rate of increase at higher energies. There
was “no significant variation over time, or any preferred
incoming direction. These results are consistent with the
positrons originating from the annihilation of dark matter
particles in space, but not yet sufficiently conclusive to
rule out other explanations.” Additional data is still being
collected and analyzed to improve experimental statistics,
especially at higher energies where the answers are expected
to lie.
In 1985, Samuel Ting married Dr. Susan Carol Marks, who
gave up her career as a psychologist to take charge of all
management affairs in Ting’s group. They have one son,
Christopher, who is currently a third-year law student at
the University of Michigan Law School. Ting also has two
daughters from a previous marriage: Jeanne Ting Chowning,
who is the director of education at the Northwest
Association for Biomedical Research, and Amy Ting, who is
an artist.

In his second year at Columbia University, Dr. Ting became
aware of an experiment at Cambridge on electron-positron
pair production that seemed to show a violation of quantum
electrodynamics. He studied the experiment, decided to
duplicate it, and was invited to do so at the Deutsches
Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY) in Frankfurt, Germany. As
a result, he began his efforts to study the physics of electron
and muon pairs, which involved searching for new particles
that could decay into them. In the search for new particles
at higher mass, now at Brookhaven National Laboratory
in 1974, his group found evidence of a new, totally
unpredicted, heavy particle—the J particle. Subsequently,
a whole family of new particles was found. It was for this
work that Ting shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in physics with
Burton Richter.
In 1995, not long after the cancellation of the
Superconducting Super Collider project had severely reduced
NOBEL CONFERENCE 49

9

thesis on the subatomic remnants of collisions of deuterium
nuclei. Smoot continued to study the decay of subatomic
particles for his doctoral thesis and received his PhD in
physics from MIT in 1970. At that time particle physics
was being done by large teams, and Smoot, wanting more
impact, jumped to the less crowded discipline of cosmology
while a research physicist at MIT. The switch to cosmology
was a natural transition, because subatomic particles were
instrumental in the birth of the universe in the Big Bang and
he was still studying the fundamental nature of the universe.

Does winning a Nobel Prize in physics make one a nerd? In
George Smoot’s case, maybe not a nerd, but a member of
the establishment. Prior to winning the prize, George Smoot
stayed on the fringes of being a nerd, playing football in high
school, volunteering as a sound tech for Jerry Garcia, and
trekking in Nepal. But after winning, he felt as though he
was thrust into the position of role model. He says, “When I
first came to Berkeley and met Nobel Prize winners, I found
out that they were regular people.” So, an appearance on the
game show Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? seemed
a good way to show his students and others that he was
human. If he failed, others, who thought that they weren’t
up to the task, might be encouraged to try. Getting help
from a 10-year old on the question of whether a porcupine
was a rodent was also a good example to students of all
ages. That wasn’t Smoot’s only TV appearance, though. He
appeared on The Big Bang Theory because he appreciates
that the scientists are portrayed as heroes. Playing himself
as the keynote speaker at a conference attended by the main
characters, ultra nerdy scientists, he delivers the classic line,
“With all due respect, Dr. Cooper, are you on crack?”
George Smoot was born in Yukon, Florida, but grew up in
a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. As a child, he was a curious
and interested in many things. He enjoyed reading science
fiction, engineering, and science books and, as he says,
“science courses drew him in.” His father was a hydrologist
and his mother a science teacher who instilled in George
a respect for learning and an interest in science and math.
He began his studies at MIT leaning toward premed, but
soon changed to mathematics and physics. He earned his
bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and physics with a senior
10

THE UNIVERSE AT ITS LIMITS

Professor Smoot won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2006
for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John
C. Mather that led to the measurement “of the black body
form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background
radiation.” He continues to study the universe and how it
came into being. In the last two decades humans have made
great strides in this area as we have realized that the radiation
left over from the Big Bang is providing a wealth of data about
the early universe. The spectrum gives us the temperature,
but the details are in the anisotropy, providing information
about the geometry of space-time as well as the distribution
of matter in the early universe. In essence we are studying the
seeds of the galaxies, and comparison to galaxy surveys also
provides information about the distribution of dark matter.
With the Planck space observatory, we now have lots of data
to analyze, but the last great advance was over ten years ago.
Smoot is concerned that we are reaching a plateau in our
understanding and is looking for something to point us in
the direction of the next big step forward. He donated a
substantial portion of the money that he received for winning
the Nobel Prize to UC Berkeley to establish the Berkeley
Center for Cosmological Physics. Dr. Smoot envisioned the
center as a place where young postdoctoral researchers could
explore and dream up lofty projects just as he did when he
studied cosmic microwave background radiation.
When asked what the future will bring, Professor Smoot
indicates that he expects new large scale surveys of galaxies
and continued study of the cosmic microwave background
radiation with a new satellite to probe the polarization of
the radiation. Although we will have an incredibly rich set
of data, he guesses that the existing models will fit the data
very well and we will be left looking for new directions in
other places. One of those places will likely be in the area
of extrasolar planets, studying their properties to better
understand solar system formation, but also looking for
evidence of life on those planets.
George Smoot likes to travel. He likes being outdoors,
gardening, and taking hikes and is often lucky enough to be
able to hike in the Alps. He has enjoyed learning more about
the Middle Ages by listening to courses on his IPod. Because
he has appointments at both Berkeley and at Paris Diderot
University, he doesn’t have a lot of free time.

Lawrence M. Krauss, PhD, Foundation

Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration,
Department of Physics, and director of the Origins
Project, Arizona State University, Tempe

Many mothers want their children to grow up to be
doctors. But Lawrence Krauss’s mom was still holding
out hope when, immediately after he earned his Ph.D., he
was named Junior Fellow in the Physics Department at
Harvard. She suggested that he was still young and had
time to go back to medical school.
But Krauss followed his passion, one that he had acquired
when just a young teenager reading books about physicists
like Einstein, Feynman, and Gammow. He wanted to
be a scientist. He wanted to understand the universe
and humans’ place in it. He had other interests, too—
philosophy and history, which fueled his interest in the
connections between science and society and culminated
in his being named the director of the Origins Project
at Arizona State University, a transdisciplinary initiative
that nurtures research, energizes teaching, and builds
partnerships, offering new possibilities for exploring the
most fundamental of questions: Who are we? and Where
did we come from?
Professor Krauss believes that people should be driven by
what interests them and, since early in his life, his interests
have been dominated by the mysterious. He studied
mathematics and physics at Carleton University in Ottawa,
not far from his home in Toronto. He continued his
formal education at MIT, earning the PhD in physics in
1982 before beginning his stint at Harvard. He taught in
both the Physics and Astronomy departments at Yale for a
number of years while collaborating as a visiting scientist
at Boston University, the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics. In 1993, he became the Ambrose Swasey
Professor of Physics and Professor of Astronomy at Case
Western Reserve University, where he served as chair of
physics, director of the Office of Science, Public Policy,
and Bio-Entrepreneurship in Case Western’s School of
Medicine, and director of the Center for Education and
Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics. In August 2008
Krauss joined the faculty at Arizona State University as
Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space
Exploration and the Department of Physics, also assuming
responsibilities as director of a university initiative, the
Origins Project.

an idea that he comes up with late at night might explain
some aspect of it. Krauss was one of the first physicists to
suggest that most of the mass and energy of the Universe
resides in empty space, an idea now widely known as
“dark energy.” He has authored several best-selling books,
including The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from
Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing.
He has been recognized for his contributions to public
education in science, most recently in 2012 when he was
awarded the National Science Board’s Public Service Medal.
When asked about the practical significance of his work,
Lawrence says that it doesn’t have any. But he quickly
points out that like art, literature, and music, it has
cultural significance, connecting us to the cosmos and, in a
profound way, helping us understand our origins. Even as
it appears that humans have less significance in the universe,
what we do becomes more significant.
Krauss’s broad ranging interests and diverse career path
have provided him with opportunities to cross the chasm
between science and popular culture. For example, he has
performed solo with the Cleveland Orchestra, narrating
Gustav Holst’s The Planets at the Blossom Music Center
in the most highly attended concert at that venue, and
was nominated for a Grammy Award for his liner notes
accompanying a Telarc CD of music from Star Trek. In
2005 he also served as a jury member at the Sundance Film
Festival, and most recently he has produced and starred in
a full-length film, The Unbelievers, which premiered this
spring. In it, Krauss and Richard Dawkins cross the globe
as they speak publicly about the importance of science and
reason in the modern world.
In his spare time, Lawrence Krauss enjoys mountain biking,
fly fishing, and meeting new people. But he really enjoys his
work, having time to think about things and writing. He
says of his work with the Origins Project at Arizona State
University that it is “like being a kid in a candy shop.”

Although his primary research is in cosmology and particle
physics, he has worked in a very broad range of the
sciences. He sees the universe as one big experiment in
which to test our theories and continues to be surprised
that we can understand the Universe and that occasionally
NOBEL CONFERENCE 49

11

of galaxy characterized by extremely bright nuclei with
spectra containing very bright emission lines of hydrogen,
helium, nitrogen, and oxygen. With his assignment as
director of the Vatican Observatory in 1978 came more
administrative responsibilities, but he continued his
research in close binary systems. He retired as director
of the Vatican Observatory in 2006 and from the
observatory itself in 2011. He in now McDevitt Chair of
Religious Philosophy at Le Moyne College in Syracuse,
New York, where he teaches astronomy and science
and religion courses. Coyne was granted an honorary
doctorate by Le Moyne in recognition of “his tireless
effort to promote an open dialogue between philosophy,
theology, and the sciences,” as part of his work “to bridge
the gap between faith and science.”

The Rev. George V. Coyne, SJ,

PhD, McDevitt Chair of Religious Philosophy, Le
Moyne College, Syracuse, N.Y.; director emeritus of
the Vatican Observatory, and former head of the
observatory’s research group based at the University
of Arizona, Tucson

The Jesuit order is well known for being intellectual,
so when George Coyne joined at age 18, he knew
what to expect. However, he didn’t know where his
interests would take him. If not for his Greek professor,
an amateur astronomer, he might not have discovered
the wonders of astronomy and their relationship to
religious belief. Coyne completed his bachelor’s degree in
mathematics and his licentiate in philosophy at Fordham
University in 1958. As the study of science and his
religious faith became an intimate part of his thinking, he
was asked by his superiors to go on to study for his PhD
in astronomy. He carried out a spectrophotometric study
of the lunar surface for the completion of his doctorate
in astronomy at Georgetown University in 1962. He
continued to do research and teach in astronomy while
continuing his theological studies and was ordained a
Roman Catholic priest in 1965.
Coyne believes that the universe participates in the
mystery of the god who created it. Although he began his
astronomical research in the solar system and went on to
the University of Arizona to continue his lunar research,
he quickly became interested in the evolution of stars and
the complexities of evolution in close binary systems. In
nearly 40 years of active research in the subject Father
Coyne has published more than 50 scientific papers on
interstellar space, binary systems, variable stars, and the
tools astronomers use to study them. He even spent
some time doing research on Seyfert galaxies, a class

12

THE UNIVERSE AT ITS LIMITS

While at the Vatican Observatory, Coyne began a number
of new educational and research initiatives in his efforts
to urge the Catholic Church to use good science in
their decision-making. The Vatican Observatory wasn’t
involved in any issues related to human life, and there
are no direct implications of his research, but his work
does indirectly affect science and science education. For
close to ten years, Coyne has been a vocal opponent of
intelligent design. He was quoted as saying, “Intelligent
design isn’t science even though it pretends to be.” In an
interview for the BBC documentary “A War on Science,”
he criticized intelligent design as being unscientific and
suggested that the Archbishop of Vienna was pressured
by the Discovery Institute to publish an article in the
New York Times critical of evolution. Father Coyne is
concerned that fundamentalist religious beliefs might
continue to influence the role of science in the modern
decision-making process.
To some it appeared that Father Coyne’s retirement
from the Vatican Observatory was controversial. Some
even suggested that he was replaced due to his criticism
of intelligent design and its supporters, particularly
the Archbishop. However, Coyne denies this. He does
indicate that his appointment as director may have been
unsettling to some in the Catholic Church. He was
appointed to the position by Pope John Paul I shortly
after he was elected pope and only a short time before he
died of an apparent heart attack. Father Coyne continues
to wonder if he may have contributed to the stress that
caused his heart attack.
Father George Coyne enjoys biking, hiking, and
snowshoeing when he isn’t teaching or debating science
and religion with the likes of Richard Dawkins.

S. James Gates Jr, PhD, University System of
Maryland Regents Professor, the John S. Toll Professor
of Physics, and director, Center for String and Particle
Theory, University of Maryland, College Park

Most of us can remember receiving a toy for a birthday or
Christmas that, despite the initial excitement and all of the
hype, disappointed us by becoming boring in a few days.
Maybe it is because we didn’t understand what the toy was
about, or maybe it was really not that interesting. That
isn’t a problem for Dr. Sylvester James Gates, who thinks
of physics as the toy that never gets boring. He has had the
toy since he was in high school, and it still brings him so
much excitement that it seems it will never end. Jim recalls
his mother taking him to see a movie about rockets and
space travel called Spaceway when he was four years old and
how he attempted to explain it all to his father that evening
when he got home. His dad remembered Jim’s interests and
when he was eight got him four books by Willy Ley that
kept his curiosity about space alive. Like many young people
of that time, Jim also found inspiration thumbing through
the encyclopedia, where he found Schroedinger’s equation
and wondered if he would ever be able to understand it.
Well, Professor Gates not only understands Schroedinger’s
equation better than almost anyone, he makes significant use
of it in his work.
After taking a high school course in physics, Jim was hooked
on math and physics, but where to go to college to study
it was actually inspired by an episode of Make Room for
Daddy in which a nephew comes to visit the family. When
Gates learned that the genius nephew went to a school
where you only have to study the “good stuff” like math,
physics, and engineering, he knew that the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology was the place for him. Jim Gates
received his bachelor’s degree in 1973 and his PhD in 1977.
His doctoral thesis was the first at MIT on supersymmetry.
With M. T. Grisaru, M. Rocek, and W. Siegel, Gates
coauthored Superspace, or One Thousand and One Lessons
in Supersymmetry in 1984, the first comprehensive book
on supersymmetry. His postgraduate studies started as a
Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and, after an
appointment at Caltech, he received a faculty appointment at
MIT and in 1984 at the University of Maryland at College
Park, where he is currently the John S. Toll Professor
of Physics. He was the first African American to hold an
endowed chair in physics at a major research university in the
United States.

“appeared” in his head. Professor Gates has authored or
co-authored more than 120 research papers in the areas of
the mathematical and theoretical physics of supersymmetric
particles, fields, and strings, covering topics such as the
physics of quarks, leptons, gravity, super and heterotic
strings, and unified field theories.
Gates was excited to see the announcement from CERN
concerning the discovery of the Higgs Boson, but is still
wondering if the ambiguity in the announcements leaves
open the possibility of discovering more Higgs particles.
If supersymmetry theory is correct, there should be five
Higgs particles. He is also wondering when the discovery
of superpartners or “sparticles,” hypothetical elementary
particles predicted by the supersymmetry theory, will come.
The fact that no superpartners have yet been found may
indicate that supersymmetry is incorrect, or it may also be
the result of the fact that supersymmetry is not an exact,
unbroken symmetry of nature.
Those who attended Nobel Conference 41, “The Legacy of
Einstein,” will recall that Jim Gates is a real advocate for the
importance of science. He often refers to the biblical passage
stating “if the leaders have no vision the people fail” as he
argues that humans’ only defense against a changing and
potentially hostile world will be our technology. The reason
that species became extinct—here he uses the example of
dinosaurs—is that they didn’t have scientists with vision to
develop the technology that would allow them to survive.
Jim Gates is very proud of his family: his wife, Dianna, who
is a pediatrician and head of a county health agency, and his
twin daughter and son, who are juniors at the University
of Maryland, both pursuing double majors in the sciences
and math. He enjoys traveling and talking about science
and math and the relationship to his faith. For years he has
been mistaken for Morgan Freemam, so he is excited that
Freeman will be narrating some footage on chemistry that
Gates shot for PBS.

When asked about his work, Gates replies, “I sit and wonder
about the nature of the universe, of the nature of symmetry
and super symmetry, and I do calculations with a pencil on
paper.” He says that sometimes the answers come to him
“out of the blue,” like the time he sent two graduate students
off to solve a problem and two weeks later the answer just
NOBEL CONFERENCE 49

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THE NOBEL CONFERENCE CONCERT
DARK ENERGY
Tuesday, October 1 | Christ Chapel | 8:15 p.m.
Open to the public; no ticket required
The 49th Nobel Concert will bring you to the “inner universe” with music by Dmitri
Shostakovich (1906–1975) and Johannes Brahms (1833–1897). The program will
feature two contrasting piano trios that share a powerful dark energy.

Shostakovich wrote the Piano Trio in E Minor in 1944 during World War II,
mourning the death of his close friend. A sense of suffering pervades the piece, from
the eerie sound of the opening cello to the final sounds of a Jewish prayer.
The Piano Trio in C Minor (1886) by Brahms will awaken the audience from the
meditative state with a powerful opening movement. The entire piece is full of the
passion and energy of the late Romantic period.

ART AT THE NOBEL CONFERENCE
STRING THEORY, AND THE SUPERCONDUCTING SUPER COLLIDER
SERIES: Paintings by Lucinda Mason; AMERICAN ASSOCIATED ARTISTS:
Art by Subscription; and RECENT ACQUISITIONS AND DEBUTS OF
THE HILLSTROM MUSEUM OF ART
Nobel Conference Reception | Tuesday, October 1 | 6–8 p.m.
September 9–November 10 | Hillstrom Museum of Art
Open to the public; no ticket required

The late Lucinda Mason (1974–2007), an artist and art critic who received her MFA
from Concordia University, Montreal, began a series of paintings shortly before her
sudden death in which she sought to explore the micro and macro elements of the
world, asking, “What does the space look like inside the nucleus of an atom?,” “Can
one paint the essential make-up of energy?,” and “Can one paint the immeasurable
space?” Mason’s large-scale oil paintings in String Theory, and the Superconducting
Super Collider Series use abstract patterns that employ dots and lines of paint that
coalesce to resemble the cosmos and its motion and energy.
American Associated Artists: Art by Subscription features 75 prints, the majority of
them dating from the 1930s and 1940s, made by prominent American artists such
as Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), Peggy Bacon (1895–1987), and Reginald
Marsh (1898–1954) for American Associated Artists (AAA). That company, begun by
entrepreneur Reeves Lewenthal in 1934, sought to bring affordable art to middle-class
America through relatively inexpensive prints that were marketed through department
stores and the U. S. Postal Service, a successful venture made all the more remarkable
given its inception during the Great Depression. The exhibition was organized by and
drawn from the collection of the Springfield Museum of Art in Ohio.

The Hillstrom Museum of Art Collection includes a number of AAA prints, one of
which, by Grant Wood (1891–1942), is included in Recent Acquisitions and Debuts
of the Hillstrom Museum of Art. Several works—recently acquired by donation or, in a
few instances, purchased with funds resulting from donation—are being shown for the
first time. The exhibition includes paintings, prints, and photography, with landscapes,
cityscapes, genre scenes, and portraits amongst them.

CONTRIBUTORS TO NOBEL CONFERENCE® 49
The Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College, the first educational conference of its kind in the United States, is made
possible through income generated by a Nobel Conference endowment and the support of annual conference contributors.
The Nobel Conference Endowment Fund was created in July 1978 and is permanently secured as a result of the generous
support of the Rev. Drell and Adeline Bernhardson. Other gifts to the fund have been made by Russell and Rhoda Lund; the
Mardag Foundation, in memory of Edgar B. Ober; and the UnitedHealth Group. Contributors to the 2013 conference include
the Katherine B. Andersen Fund of the Saint Paul Foundation, Cambria, Heroic Productions, and the Robert E. and Susan T.
Rydell Distinguished Visiting Professor Fund.

HHMI-SUPPORTED PROGRAM USES NOBEL CONFERENCE
TO ENHANCE HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE TEACHING
In 2008, Gustavus Adolphus College received a $1 million science education grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
(HHMI) of Chevy Chase, Md. It has supported a variety of programs that seek to transform the first-year student experience
in the STEM disciplines (science and math)—particularly through collaboration between the Departments of Biology and
Chemistry.
In addition, the grant supports an innovative year-long outreach program that utilizes the topic of the College’s annual two-day
Nobel Conference to enhance high school science education and to better prepare participating teachers and their students to
attend the conference. A central component of the program is the role of selected high school teachers in developing specially
designed lesson plans that are integrated into their teaching. The grant also supports the approximately 400 participating
students who attend the conference by contributing to all program costs, including those related to conference tickets and
transportation.

THE RYDELL PROFESSORSHIP AT GUSTAVUS
The Drs. Robert E. and Susan T. Rydell Professorship at Gustavus Adolphus College is a scholar-in-residence program
designed to bring Nobel laureates, Nobel conference presenters, and similarly distinguished scholars and researchers to
campus as catalysts for enhancing learning and teaching. It was established in 1993 by the late Dr. Robert Rydell ’46
and his wife, Dr. Susan Rydell, of Minnetonka, Minn., “to give students the opportunity to learn from and interact with
leading scholars.” To date, fifteen scholars and scientists have been in residence at Gustavus through the auspices of this
professorship.
After participating as one of the invited presenters at the 2005 Nobel Conference, “The Legacy of Einstein,” Sylvester James
Gates Jr., PhD, University System of Maryland Regents Professor, the John S. Toll Professor of Physics, and director, Center
for String and Particle Theory, University of Maryland, College Park, returned to Gustavus during the spring of 2007 as the
College’s tenth Rydell Professor, team-teaching an upper-division physics course and presenting a public lecture.
Professor Gates is back again this year as one of eight invited presenters at the College’s 49th Nobel Conference, “The
Universe at Its Limits,” and likewise, he has accepted a second appointment as Gustavus’s Rydell Professor. Among his
Rydell-related activities, Gates will headline a 2013 Nobel Conference Preview Event on campus on September 20 (2:30
p.m., Alumni Hall), will visit two of the high schools participating in the HHMI outreach program (above), and will
deliver a conference preview lecture at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul on Sunday, September 29 (7:30 p.m.,
Omnitheater). The events are open to the public without charge, but reservations are requested for the Science Museum
lecture due to limited space. (Visit gustavustickets.com to make reservations.)